Report: President Trump Picks Former Verizon Lawyer Ajit Pai To Head FCC
from the populism-schmopulism dept
As many expected, Donald Trump has chosen former Verizon lawyer and current FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to head the FCC, according to a report by Politico. According to two anonymous insiders "familiar with the decision," Pai, who met with Trump on Monday, should be formally announced as FCC boss in short order. Pai recently proclaimed that net neutrality's "days are numbered" under Trump, while stating that the reformed FCC would be taking a "weed whacker" to "unnecessary regulations" like the FCC's net neutrality rules and its new consumer broadband privacy protections.
Politico rather soft sells the controversy that Pai will represent to those who don't think technology policy should be dictated by Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications:
"Pai is already a familiar name in tech and telecom policy debates. He’s a fierce and vocal critic of many regulations passed by the commission's Democratic majority, including the 2015 net neutrality rules that require internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally and are opposed by the major broadband companies."Let's be clear here. Pai has supported the incumbent duopoly providers on nearly every issue of substance. He has vilified net neutrality to an often-comic degree, falsely claiming the rules encouraged dictators in North Korea and Iran and led to a massive slowdown in industry investment. He has consistently refused to even admit the U.S. broadband market has a competition problem. He's made it abundantly clear he wants to eliminate every FCC consumer protection function, and, alongside fellow Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, has even repeatedly voted down holding AT&T accountable for outright fraud.
If you're looking for somebody who will rubber stamp every Comcast request shoveled in his general direction, Pai is certainly your man. If you're looking for an FCC leader who's going to care about consumer issues or the plight of the startup or small business in a word dominated by massive, ever-consolidating telecom conglomerates, you're about to get a master class in disappointment. The irony, of course, is that Pai is about as far from the "populist" rhetoric President Trump leaned on to get elected as one can get:
January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2017
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Maybe we should start a petition at www.whitehouse.gov.
I looked today. It's still up. All the old petitions and accounts have been cleared out.
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It's be nice if people didn't have goldfish political memories.
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I submit that it already had, and long ago.
Like that old joke where a guy asks a girl to sleep with them for a million bucks and she says yes...
he then asks... well how about for 100 and she then says no, she is not a hooker.
his reply is, we have already established that you are for sale, now we are just negotiating the price.
The same is said here... were are just negotiating this administrations terms for the regulatory capture.
And you are correct that people have goldfish political memories.
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Do you have any suggestions on fixing it? Are you the anon who always shows up in the comments to say the FCC needs to be eliminated (or scaled back to just regulating the spectrum, which appears to be the Trump Administration's intent)?
I submit that what we really need is campaign finance reform and stronger preventions against the revolving door between government and industry.
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Many have been made by myself and others, you just keep ignoring them and then saying no one ever makes a suggestion. Typical tripe, I guess you clowns did not learn with the ascension of Trumpalo. You can lie, ignore, or marginalize people with your own special brand of stupid but it does not always work.
You really are as thick this this guy right here...
http://bmsgoats.wikia.com/wiki/Thad_Castle
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That's a lot of assumption based on someone not knowing what prior suggestions to attribute to an AC (and asking).
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there is just no way to look over the past articles here at TD and know any better.
You folks need to understand the difference between not liking someones solutions and someone not offering a solution. It was a favored lie of Obama as well, no wonder many of his sheeple have adopted the same.
Solutions have been offered on all sides to the point where the terms Pro-Regulation and Anti-Regulation are as equally presumptive as right/left, lib/con, rep/dem, and up/down. You have a specific narrative to push and you double down on the stupid in the process. Pro-Regulation does not mean anything regulation goes and neither does anti-regulation mean zero regulation of any kind.
If all you have for a tool is a hammer, then all problems begin to look like nails.
For Democrats, the tool of choice is marginalization, which means every problem becomes something to be marginalized.
White privilege? marginalize it!
Anti-PC rhetoric? marginalize it!
Anything not in alignment with your agenda? marginalize it!
In this way you treat others as insignificant or without contribution. The democratic party is the party of hubris, and pride does goeth before the fall! Hillary & possibly the whole Clintoon family recently experienced it along with many whine without cheeze democrats!
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wow
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It got trump in office, is that not what he wanted?
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Bush, Obama, and Trump are signs of an ignorant and foolish citizenry.
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Are we great yet?
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the gap between the rich and poor grew with fervor during his admin. Nice to see you take off the rose colored glasses when it suits your political commentary.
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With corporations raping everything that does not fight back, is it any wonder that a wage gap increases. Hell, those friggin banksters even got a bonus after trashing the world economy - as if that was what they were being measured by. So yeah, lets just blame one person for everyone else's screwups.
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Oh, it's even worse. You should see what Obama did in the wake of the 2007/8 global financial meltdown. To paraphrase Oliver, it's Presidential Fuckery on a Corporate Scale:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/?ref_=nv_sr_4
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/01/18/rich-people-own-much-money-half-world-report-says/y 6az3Wtasd5TIf9Q6k3I4K/story.html
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You seem to have forgotten something important...
So see, Trump really is for government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The only issue is that he, Trump, aka PotUS, only considers corporations as people.
To Trump, human beings are just bags of mostly water waiting to be stepped upon by the psychophantic imbeciles that he's selected to head up the federal agencies he's allowed to muck with.
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Re: You seem to have forgotten something important...
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Re: You seem to have forgotten something important...
On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons,
Citizens United did no such thing and I wish people would quit repeating this. Corporations have always enjoyed some of the same rights that individuals do, for example the right to own property and the right to enter into contracts. Some individual rights, like the right to vote or the right to marry, corporations will never have.
All Citizens did was to reinforce that groups of like-minded people have First Amendment rights as a group.
Here is how the Brennen Center for Justice puts it:
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It's an issue of semantics (as all law is).
Santa Clara is the primary SCOTUS case cited in establishing the precedent of corporate personhood (as noted in your link). The problem is that it didn't, really; the reference to corporate personhood was in a headnote, wasn't intended to be recorded at all, and certainly wasn't intended as precedent-setting.
Citizens United defined the principle of a corporation's right to free speech in a clearer, less ambiguous, and presumably more precedent-setting way than Santa Clara. To say that it established corporate personhood is reductive, but I wouldn't say it's incorrect.
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Re: Re: Re: You seem to have forgotten something important...
What is needed is a delineation between corporate personhood and individual personhood. Right now you should incorporate to do almost anything since it is cheaper, more effective and less risky when you hide activities behind a corporate alias. It has always been so, but with the establishment of corporate personhood enjoying these rights, you are bad off not using an alias. (says the AC!)
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Appointment
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Then you staff it with people that will rules as you like to make sure that whatever power it *does* still have will be used as you desire.
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https://www.aclu.org/
https://www.eff.org/
https://www.freepress.net/
also you can set them as your charity on https://smile.amazon.com/
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So suck it up.
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Specifically, what decisions are these to which you refer and what exactly in them associates them with any particular political leaning?
"They really didn't appear to have the authority to enact legislation"
I was unaware that the FCC authored legislation, are you willing to share details? I thought only congress did that sort of thing (even though they don't actually write anything)
"So suck it up."
Ummmm - I'm sucking anything, but thanks anyways.
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Regulation = Law (usually done by the agencies which is unconstitutional as OP stated as congress lacks the authority to grant agencies law or regulation writing powers)
Legislation = Law (provided by the legislative branch which is comprised of the House and Congress)
So of regulation and legislation carries the same weight of law behind them... then they are one and the same! A distinction without a difference!
Surely this is not the first time you have run across the government using forked tongue words to muddy the constitutional waters?
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"It's fun to watch liberal snowflakes getting all upset because the socialist decisions of the FCC are likely to get overturned."
By 'socialist decisions' you mean consumer protection rules that attempt to prevent big corporations from ripping off the public, stop anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior and protect your privacy, and which have broad non-partisan support from the public? What the hell kind of sociopath are you that you would celebrate overturning that? Or are you just another paid shill or someone who'd benefit directly from this at the public's expense?
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Stop buying into the fallacy
Trump is no one's president. Stop normalizing the insane.
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TD was just as alarmist when Wheeler took office.
And it is worth pointing out that Wheelers regs were very appeasement oriented. They were not a technological transliteration of Constitutional principles, but more apologist compromises for past rapes, while the telecom sector still had its dick in the Constitution.
So it doesn't really matter what they say at this point. Repealing some of the NN regs, isn't a bad thing if they are replaced with regs that are in better conformance with the bill or rights.
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